An Office With a View

There’s a photo my husband won’t let me publish of him on a video call with the whole team, dead serious about a deployment, with a goat investigating the wing mirror just behind his head. The goat won the meeting.

The unromantic engine room

I get to give up the nine-to-five for the camera. He doesn’t, and honestly the whole thing only works because he doesn’t. The day job in tech is what keeps the diesel in the tank and the camera bodies insured, and a surprising amount of this trip has been planned around one unglamorous question: will there be signal.

So while I’m out before dawn, he’s wedged into the bench seat that doubles as his desk, laptop propped on a board he cut to fit, working a full day to a screen with the Atlantic going on behind it. Solar on the roof keeps the batteries topped up. A signal booster does its best. When both fail, we move on until the little bars come back, which is its own way of choosing where to be.

Two different trips, same van

People assume vanlife means nobody’s working. For us it’s the opposite, it only exists because one of us very much is. And there’s something I’ve come to love about that split: I come back from a morning on a clifftop, buzzing, memory card full, and he’s three hours into a workday like any other, just with a better view and the occasional goat.

We make a point of stopping properly at the end of his day. Hob on, something cooking, the laptop firmly shut. The work pays for the freedom. The least we can do is notice the freedom when it’s there.